Google Drive has arrived, clearly targets businesses

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The buzz surrounding the cloud storage service, Google Drive, has been increasing dramatically over the last month. Leaks about the service seemed to be coming from every nook and cranny of the internet, filled with the knowledge that the best features have yet to be unveiled. The most consistent rumor in recent days — that Google Drive would be released today — was confirmed as Senior Vice President of Google Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai brought Google Drive to the world with his blog post. Now that the service has been released, the question of the day is how the it compares to the rest of the cloud storage products available today.

Pricing and capacity

Google Drive gives all individual users 5GB of storage, as we saw roll out this morning to Google Docs accounts. If you need more than 5GB of storage, Google’s pricing starts at $2.49/month for 20GB, and scales all the way up to a massive 16TB for $800/month. Your Google Drive account is available on any browser, as well as on Windows, OS X, and Android. An iOS app will be available “in the coming weeks”, but is not available at launch.

Because documents in Google Docs don’t count against your storage cap, so you’ll be getting a lot more out of that storage if you use Docs. As for the competition, Dropbox offers you only 2GB for free, but they will raise that as you recruit other users to Dropbox.

Features

Being labeled as “the evolution of Google Docs” Drive offers up a handful of features that really speak to that label. For starters, Drive is available on every modern browser, but alongside that Drive will offer the ability to view up to 30 different file types. Among those include Adobe files (like PSD, PDF, and AI), but also video files, including HD videos. Users you are collaborating are able to comment on all of the file types that are viewable in the browser as well.

Something we don’t usually hear a lot about from cloud storage services is reliability. In the business world, the idea that your files could be unreachable due to some sort of malfunction with your provider is unacceptable. Google is offering 99.9% uptime on Drive across the board, which is only slightly less of a guarantee than the 99.95% uptime guarantee as outlined by Amazon’s EC2 service. Dropbox doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee for their free service, nor do they offer an SLA for any of their pricing levels.

What would a Google service be without search? Google Drive offers up a twist on simply being able to search for your documents — it allows you to search the contents of the files in Drive. This is more extensive than you might think. To use the example provided by Google, if you scan an image of a newspaper clipping, Google will attempt to search the words on that image as a part of your search results.

Assuming Google plans to use the image recognition chops they have gained with Google Goggles, there stands a good chance of the image recognition for text being pretty exciting.

Apps

Something that is sure to separate Google Drive from the cloud storage pack is the ability to write and use apps with the service. Alongside the launch of Google Drive, a plethora of apps that tie directly into Drive were added to the Chrome Web Store. Many of these apps include unique features, like the ability to fax documents in Drive with HelloFax, or a featureful photo editor with Pixlr Editor. Install these apps onto your Chrome account, and use them right with Drive.

Developers can also get into Drive apps with the Google Drive SDK. Here you can modify an existing app you might have in the Chrome Web Store and add the “Works with Google Drive” tag to your app, or take a look at the API reference material for Google Drive to write a brand new app. Drive apps come with the single caveat that you need to be using Google Chrome, but the added functionality of the apps in Google Drive might be enough for many to make the switch.

Is it worth the switch?

Google Drive looks impressive from a pricing standpoint, and adding more functionality to Google Docs is great, but I don’t see Drive replacing Dropbox for me anytime soon. The features that make Dropbox the killer app for me include its sharing functions. The Dropbox Public folder is a service unlike any other. With one right-click I am offered a short URL that I can paste anywhere and have people simply grab that file. It’s clear that Drive is not going to serve that purpose, and that is perfectly alright with me.

Drive has taken the Google Docs experience and offered up some seriously impressive new features, aiming the crosshairs squarely at Microsoft and their SkyDrive as well as Apple’s iCloud. For now, Dropbox and Google Drive will happily coexist on my computer, serving their individual purposes.